I just read a post in IBW forum and thought a bit about crappy websites around. What would be the website I would like to return to? I have been testing, developing and managing websites for over 8 years now. I would love to share my ideas with you.
So let’s imagine ideal website. What are the pages and information I would love to see there?
- First page should contain companies mission statement, slogan or some kind of information about what they are doing. If I don’t see that, I don’t even continue to look at the website.
- About page. This is second page I search for. Why this website was created? Who is company behind it? How big it is? Who are the partners? Is it be reliable?
- Clients / Products / Case Study pages. These are the most important pages after the first page. What this company had done before? How much clients they have already? Who are those clients? What products they have developed? What are the success stories?
- Contact page. You wouldn’t believe it, but a lot of websites forget it. I have seen wonderful websites in design but there is no information at all how I can contact company. It often makes me mad and I can’t even complain.
Basically Attention Interest Desire and Action (AIDA) principle should be in every website.
What would make me close the site and don’t visit again?
- Broken links (pages that leads to “Not Found” or errors)
- More than 5 colors on website. Don’t believe person who says the more colorful website is, the more interesting it will be for clients. If my eyes hurts from looking at your site I will close it.
- Too much text. Keep it simple. Very few people will read a whole page of text. Usually they will just quit after the second sentence even if it will be written in the most beautiful lyrics. Highlight the important things, add diagrams, pictures and tables.
- Bad Spelling. I’m not native English so I know what I’m talking about. When I developed my first website and asked person to look at the idea of it, he kept highlighting my spelling errors and didn’t look at the idea at all. Would you want your users to look at your grammar instead of your products?
- A lot of pictures. Thought pictures should be there, a lot of them will make site to load forever.
- Inconsistent design. Would you get annoyed if “Home” button is placed in different place in every page? What if links are in different color in every page? Keep the template same over all the pages.
- No cross-browser testing. Everybody uses latest Internet Explorer. Why should I test it on other browsers? Only 26% of the browsers used IE7 in August 2008 – check Browser Statistics table to see other browsers
- Music in background. Thought there are few sites that gives nice atmosphere feeling with music, after a while it gets annoying. There should be button to switch it off and think twice about music before you put it in website.
Myths:
- If I send person away from my site when he click on links, he/she won’t return to my site. A lot of people would return to your site if it leads to interesting content. I keep returning to Dublin Blog because it keeps update events and news in Dublin. I return to IrishDev because it shows events I’m interested in. Well.. you get the point.
Tips:
- Buy design online. There is a lot of designers selling already ready design. You can shop around and pick the one you like. Think twice before going with the design that you imagined. Are you a designer? Do you know everything about good designs?
- Even if you build nice website, it won’t be found unless it has some keywords and some promotion. Keywords is easy to do. However Internet Promotion could take over 6 months (depending on what you want to do) and might be quite expensive. But I know few people who keep posting in forums, other blogs and everywhere around web just to get their website Google rank to go up.
- Think about your target audience before developing website. Is it Ireland you are targeting? Is it IT companies or biology students? What they will be searching for in your website?
- Communication. It might be forums, blogs or surveys. People love to communicate with others and they will return to your site just because of that.
Developing website is just another IT project. And believe me or not the time spend on the IT project planning is at least 50% of all development time. Plan, shop around, ask people and see examples. If you know what you want development itself will be fast, easy and cheap.
